“Well, that’s the guy,” Winston said.
“So what are you saying he did?” the President asked.
Mark Gant set up his computer on the President’s desk, this time with a Secret Service agent immediately behind him and watching every move, and this time he took it slow because Roger Durling, unlike Ryan, Fiedler, and the Fed Chairman, didn’t really understand all the ins and outs. He did prove to be an attentive audience, however, stopping the presentation to ask questions, making a few notes, and three times asking for a repeat of a segment of the presentation. Finally he looked over to the Secretary of the Treasury.
“Buzz?”
“I want our people to verify the information independently—”
“That won’t be hard,” Winston told them. “Any one of the big houses will have records almost identical to this. My people can help organize it for you.”
“If it’s true, Buzz?”
“Then, Mr. President, this situation comes more under Dr. Ryan’s purview than mine,” SecTreas replied evenly. His relief was tempered with anger at the magnitude of what had been done. The two outsiders in the Oval Office didn’t yet understand that.
Ryan’s mind was racing. He’d ignored Gant’s repeated explanation of the “how” of the event. Though the presentation to the President was clearer and more detailed than the first two times—the man would have made a fine instructor at a business school—the important parts were already fixed in the National Security Advisor’s mind. Now he had the how, and the how told him a lot. This plan had been exquisitely planned and executed. The timing of the Wall Street takedown and the carrier/submarine attack had not been an accident. It was therefore a fully integrated plan. Yet it was also a plan which the Russian spy network had not uncovered, and that was the fact that kept repeating itself to him.
Their existing net is inside the Japanese government. It is probably concentrated on their security apparatus. But that net failed to give them strategic warning for the military side of the operation, and Sergey Nikolay’ch hasn’t connected Wall Street with the naval action yet.
Break the model, Jack, he told himself. Break the paradigm. That’s when it became clearer.
“That’s why they didn’t get it,” Ryan said almost to himself. It was like driving through patches of fog; you got into a clear spot followed by another clouded one. “It wasn’t really their government at all. It really was Yamata and the others. That’s why they want THISTLE back.” Nobody else in the room knew what he was talking about.
“What’s that?” the President asked. Jack turned his eyes to Winston and Gant, then shook his head. Durling nodded and went on. “So the whole event was one big plan?”
“Yes, sir, but we still don’t know it all.”
“What do you mean?” Winston asked. “They cripple us, start a worldwide panic, and you say there’s more?”
“George, how often have you been over there?” Ryan asked, mainly to get information to the others.
“In the last five years? I guess it comes out to an average of about once a month. My grandchildren will be using up the last of my frequent-flyer miles.”
“How often have you met with government people over there?”
Winston shrugged. “They’re around a lot. But they don’t matter very much.”
“Why?” the President asked.
“Sir, it’s like this: there’re maybe twenty or thirty people over there who really run things, okay? Yamata is the biggest fish in that lake. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry is the interface between the big boys in the corporate arena and the government, plus the way they grease the skids themselves with elected officials, and they do a lot of that stuff. It’s one of the things Yamata liked to show off when we negotiated his takeover of my Group. At one party there were two ministers and a bunch of parliamentary guys, and their noses got real brown, y’know?” Winston reflected that at the time he’d thought it a good demeanor for elected officials. Now he wasn’t quite so sure.
“How freely can I speak?” Ryan asked. “We may need their insights.”
Durling handled that: “Mr. Winston, how good are you at keeping secrets?”
The investor had himself a good chuckle. “Just so long as you don’t call it insider stuff, okay? I’ve never been hassled by the SEC, and I don’t want to start.”
“This one’ll come under the Espionage Act. We’re at war with Japan. They’ve sunk two of our submarines and crippled two aircraft carriers,” Ryan said, and the room changed a lot.
“Are you serious?” Winston asked.
“Two-hundred-and-fifty-dead-sailors serious, the crews of USS Asheville and USS Charlotte. They’ve also seized the Mariana Islands. We don’t know yet if we can take those islands back. We have upwards of ten thousand American citizens in Japan as potential hostages, plus the population of the islands, plus military personnel in Japanese custody.”
“But the media—”
“Haven’t caught on yet, remarkably enough,” Ryan explained. “Maybe it’s just too crazy.”
“Oh.” Winston got it after another second. “They wreck our economy, and we don’t have the political will to ... has anybody ever tried anything like this before?”
The National Security Advisor shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“But the real danger to us—is this problem here. That son of a bitch,” George Winston observed.
“How do we fix it, Mr. Winston?” President Durling asked.
“I don’t know. The DTC move was brilliant. The takedown was pretty cute, but Secretary Fiedler here might have smarted his way out of that with our help,” Winston added. “But with no records, everything’s paralyzed. I have a brother who’s a doctor, and once he told me ...”
Ryan’s eyeballs clicked at that remark, clicked hard enough that he didn’t listen to the rest. Why was that important?
“The time estimate came in last night,” the Fed Chairman was saying now. “They need a week. But we don’t really have a week. This afternoon we’re meeting with all the heads of the big houses. We’re going to try and ...”
The problem is that there are no records, Jack thought. Everything’s frozen in place because there are no records to tell people what they own, how much money they ...
“Europe is paralyzed, too ...” Fiedler was talking now, while Ryan stared down at the carpet. Then he looked up:
“If you don’t write it down, it never happened.” Conversation in the room stopped, and Jack saw that he might as well have said, The crayon is purple.
“What?” the Fed Chairman asked.
“My wife—that’s what she says. ‘If you don’t write it down, then it never happened.’ ” He looked around. They still didn’t understand. Which wasn’t overly surprising, as he was still developing the thought himself. “She’s a doc, too, George, at Hopkins, and she always has this damned little notebook with her, and she’s always stopping dead in her tracks to take it out and make a note because she doesn’t trust her memory.”
“My brother’s the same way. He uses one of those electronic things,” Winston said. Then his eyeballs went out of focus. “Keep going.”
“There are no records, no really official records of any of the transactions, are there?” Jack went on. Fiedler handled the answer.
“No. Depository Trust Company crashed for fair. And as I just said, it’ll take—”
“Forget that. We don’t have the time, do we?”
That depressed SecTreas again. “No, we can’t stop it.”
“Sure we can.” Ryan looked at Winston. “Can’t we?”
President Durling had been covering the snippets of conversation like a spectator at a tennis match, and the stress of the situation had placed a short fuse on his temper. “What the hell are you people talking about?”
Ryan almost had it now. He turned to his President. “Sir, it’s simple. We say it never happened. We say that after noon on Friday, the exchanges simply stopped functioning
. Now, can we get away with that?” Jack asked. He didn’t give anyone a chance to answer, however. “Why not? Why can’t we get away with it? There are no records to prove that we’re wrong. Nobody can prove a single transaction from twelve noon on, can they?”
“With all the money that everyone lost,” Winston said, his mind catching up rapidly, “it won’t look all that unattractive. You’re saying we restart ... Friday, maybe, Friday at noon ... just wipe out the intervening week, right?”
“But nobody will buy it,” the Fed Chairman observed.
“Wrong.” Winston shook his head. “Ryan’s got something here. First of all, they have to buy it. You can’t do a transaction—you can’t execute one, I mean, without written records. So nobody can prove that they did anything without waiting for reconstruction of the DTC records. Second, most people went to the cleaners, institutions, banks, everybody, and they’ll all want a second chance. Oh, yeah, they’ll buy into it, pal. Mark?”
“Step in a time machine and do Friday all over again?” Gant’s laugh was grim at first. Then it changed. “Where do we sign up?”
“We can’t do that to everything, not all the trades,” the Fed Chairman objected.
“No, we can’t,” Winston agreed. “The international T-Bill transactions were outside our control. But what we can do, sir, is conference with the European banks, show them what’s happened, and then together with them—”
Now it was Fiedler: “Yes! They dump yen and buy dollars. Our currency regains its position and theirs falls. The other Asian banks will then think about reversing their positions. The European central banks will play ball, I think.”
“You’ll have to keep the Discount Rate up,” Winston said. “That’ll sting us some, but it’s one hell of a lot better than the alternative. You keep the rate up so that people stop dumping T-Bills. We want to generate a move away from the yen, just like they did to us. The Europeans will like that because it will limit the Japs’ ability to scoop up their equities like they started doing yesterday.” Winston got off his chair and started pacing a little as he was wont to do. He didn’t know that he was violating a White House protocol, and even the President didn’t want to interrupt him, though the two Secret Service agents in the room kept a close eye on the trader. Clearly his mind was racing through the scenario, looking for holes, looking for flaws. It took perhaps two minutes, and everyone waited for his evaluation. Then his head came up. “Dr. Ryan, if you ever decide to become a private citizen again, we need to talk. Gentlemen: this will work. It’s just so damned outrageous, but maybe that works in our favor.”
“What happens Friday, then?” Jack asked.
Gant spoke up: “The market will drop like a rock.”
“What’s so damned great about that?” the President demanded.
“Because then, sir,” Gant went on, “it’ll bounce after about two hundred points, and close ... ? It’ll close down, oh, maybe a hundred, maybe not even that much. The following Monday everybody catches his breath. Some people look for bargains. Most, probably, are still nervous. It drops again, probably ends up pretty stagnant, down another fifty at most. The rest of the week, things settle out. Figure by the following Friday, the market has restabilized down one, maybe one-fifty, from the Friday-noon position. The drop will have to happen because of what the Fed has to do with the Discount Rate, but we’re used to that on the Street.” Only Winston fully appreciated the irony in the fact that Gant had it almost exactly right. He himself could hardly have done it better. “Bottom line, it’s a major hiccup, but no more than that.”
“Europe?” Ryan asked.
“It’ll be rougher over there because they’re not as well organized, but their central banks have somewhat more power,” Gant said. “Their governments can also interfere more in the marketplace. That’s both a help and a hurt. But the end result is going to be the same. It has to be, unless everyone signs on to the same suicide pact. People in our business don’t do that.”
Fiedler’s turn: “How do we sell it?”
“We get the heads of the major institutions together just as fast as we can,” Winston replied. “I can help if you want. They listen to me, too.”
“Jack?” the President asked with a turn of the head.
“Yes, sir. And we do it right away.”
Roger Durling gave it a few more seconds of thought before turning to the Secret Service agent next to his desk. “Tell the Marines to get my chopper over here. Tell the Air Force to get something warmed up for New York.”
Winston demurred. “Mr. President, I have my own.”
Ryan took that one. “George, the Air Force guys are better. Trust me.”
Durling rose and shook hands all around before the Secret Service agents conducted the others downstairs and out onto the South Lawn to await the helicopter flight to Andrews. Ryan stayed put.
“Will it really work? Can we really fix it that easily?” The politician in Roger Durling distrusted magic fixes to anything. Ryan saw the doubts and framed his answer appropriately.
“It ought to. They need something up there, and they will surely want it to work. The crucial element is that they have to know that the takedown was a deliberate act. That makes it artificial, and if they believe that it was artificial, then it’s easier for everyone to accept an irregular fix to it.”
“1 guess we’ll see.” Durling paused. “Now what does that tell us about Japan?”
“It tells us that their government isn’t the prime moving force behind this. That’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the effort will be poorly organized at some levels, that the Japanese people are disconnected from the effort, and that there may be elements in their government very uncomfortable with the undertaking.”
“The bad news?” the President asked.
“We still don’t know what their overall objective is. The government is evidently doing what it’s told. It has a solid strategic position in WestPac, and we still don’t know what to do about it. Most important of all—”
“The nukes.” Durling nodded. “That’s their trump. We’ve never been at war against someone with nuclear arms, have we?”
“No, sir. That’s a new one, too.”
The next transmission from Clark and Chavez went out just after midnight Tokyo time. This time Ding had drafted the article. John had run out of interesting things to say about Japan. Chavez, being younger, did an article that was lighter, about young people and their attitudes. It was just the cover, but you have to work hard on those, and Ding, it turned out, had learned how to write coherently at George Mason University.
“Northern Resource Area?” John asked, typing the question on the computer screen. Then he turned the machine on the coffee table.
I should have seen it sooner. It’s in one of the books back at Seoul, mano. Indonesia, belonged to the Dutch back then, was the Southern Resource Area when they kicked off Big Mistake No. 2. Care to guess what the Northern one was?
Clark just took one look and pushed the computer back. “Yevgeniy Pavlovich, go ahead and send it.” Ding erased the dialog on the screen and hooked up the modem to the phone. The dispatch went out seconds later. Then the two officers traded a look. It had been a productive day after all.
The timing for once could scarcely have been better: 00:08 in Tokyo was 18:08 in Moscow and 10:08 both at Langley and in the White House, and Jack was just reentering his office after his time at the opposite corner of the West Wing when his STU-6 started warbling.
“Yeah.”
“Ed here. We just got something important from our people in-country. The fax is coming over now. A copy’s on the way to Sergey, too.”
“Okay, standing by.” Ryan flipped the proper switch and heard the facsimile printer start to turn out its copy.
Winston wasn’t all that easy a man to impress. The VC-20 version of the Gulfstream-III business jet, he saw, was as nicely appointed as his personal aircraft—the seats and carpet were not as plush, but the communicat
ions gear was fabulous ... even enough to make a real techno-weenie like Mark happy, he thought. The two older men took the chance to catch up on sleep while he observed the Air Force crewmen run through their preflight checklist. It really wasn’t at all different from what his crewmen did, but Ryan had been right. It somehow made a difference to see military-type insignia on their shoulders. Three minutes later the executive jet was airborne and heading north for New York’s La Guardia, with the added benefit that they already had a priority approach set up, which would save fifteen minutes at the top end of the trip. As he listened, the sergeant working the communications bay was arranging an FBI car to meet them at the general-aviation terminal, and evidently the Bureau was now calling everyone who mattered in the markets for a meeting at their own New York headquarters. How remarkable, he thought, to see the government acting in an efficient manner. What a pity they couldn’t do that all the time.
Mark Gant was not paying attention to any of that. He was working on his computer, preparing what he called the case for the prosecution. He’d need about twenty minutes to get the exhibits printed up on acetate sheets for an overhead projector, something the FBI ought to be prepared for, they both hoped. From that point on ... who would deliver the information? Probably me, Winston thought. He’d let Fiedler and the Fed Chairman propose the solution, and that was fair. After all, a government guy had come up with it.
Brilliant, George Winston told himself with an admiring chuckle. Why didn’t I think of that? What else ... ?
“Mark, make a note. We’ll want to fly the European central-bank boys over here to see this. I don’t think doing it over a teleconference line will really cut it.”
Gant checked his watch. “We’ll have to call right after we get in, George, but if we do the timing ought to work out okay. The evening flights into New York—yeah, they’ll get in in the morning, and probably we can coordinate everything for a Friday restart.”
Winston looked aft. “We’ll tell them when we get in. I think they need to catch some Z’s for right now.”